Concepcion

Concepcion is the city of the North, even if it is located not far from the middle of the country. The people here speak less Spanish. Just a few of the streets are laid with tiles, and horses are as common as cars. Mopeds are the mean of transportation, but there are not as many of them as in Asia. When it comes to politics, there is not much information to obtain, and 100% of the foreign affairs seem to concern football. In Asuncion they have 12 clubs and the whole population seem to be involved in some way or another.

We arrived at the bus terminal after dark, again. The easiest thing to do was to try one of the "hospitajes" close to the station. A "hospitaje" is a sort of a guest house. Families rent a couple of rooms to travelers, and almost all the rooms were inhabited by bus drivers. We checked a couple of places and settled on a "hospitaje" with three beds, a TV and a fan. The senora who rented it was neither welcoming nor rejective, but we did not really care anyway.

The joke about being so hungry that we could eat a horse, got a completely new twist to it over the next few days, but for now we settled with some grilled meat and a vegetable salad. Vegetable salad means a can of mixed vegetables like green peas, carrots and potato. Not heated of course. The restaurant was just around the corner from the "hospitaje", where they showed he same movie as in the restaurant. Hellboy. They have the strange habit in all restaurants in Paraguay to let the TV be the dominating epicenter of the room. Maybe purposely to avoid conversation.

The next morning we wanted to figure out where to go from here. We walked the muddy dirt roads into the city center, where a few blocks had tiled roads, but they were also red from all the dirt dragged onto them.

The fruit stands and clothing tents along the street seemed even worse than the ones in Asia, and the kids who were selling were trying hard to yell louder than their neighbours. It is only the truth, but I still feel bad about saying that the people of Paraguay are some of the least attractive I have encountered. A lot of them were quite fat, their teeth are often rotten, and their facial expression is by default sad. I guess you can say that the people of Paraguay are ugly. The fact that these people were so different from their surrounding countries, especially Argentina, came as a pleasant surprise to me. It really feels like I am experiencing new things. We were not the only ones experiencing new things here. A lot of people, especially the kids, had not met many travelers, and definitely not a blond haired, two meter tall man with a camera strapped around his neck. Some kids were curious, some seemed frightened. Girls closer to our age would whistle, shout animal noises, and wave at us. Despite these approaches, and the eager salesmen in the store where we looked for clothing and shoes, I got the feeling that most people in Paraguay were not very talkative. This may be because of their difficulties with understanding Spanish, or just being scared of strangers, but I would put my bets on the first. Most buildings were falling apart, but what caught our attention the most was the stray animals. After traveling through Asia I have learned to walk through a pack of rabid dogs, but I think I will never get brave enough to walk right into the stray horses they have in Concepcion. Horses were feeding on the little grass that was to be found in the city center. If there was just one of them it was easy to walk around, but with several of the dirty, hungry, kicking animals blocking he street it was better to take the next block down.

In a shop where they sold camping equipment we got stuck talking to a guy for more than 20 minutes. He said that he worked only to make some money to travel. He must have been about 55 years old, and he traveled around South America in a car on all his vacations. I wanted to buy a mosquito net, and ended up buying the best they had, despite of the awful pink color.

When talking about Patagonia, the man would pinch his thumb and index finger together and make a horizontal movement from left to right in front of his mouth, while saying "que linda, que linda". I am sure he said this at least 60 times in 15 minutes. He would do the same when talking about going from Concepcion to Bahia Negra, the last pueblo in northern Paraguay. From there it was supposed to be a boat to Corumba, Brazil, and from there a bus to Bolivia. We asked when the boat would leave, and it turned out that the only day it left was tuesday. We were lucky, it was Monday.

We started to get exited about such a boat trip. Three days to Bahia Negra, from there we could get to Bolivia in a day, if there were boats going. Worst case, we would be suck some days in a village of less than 800 inhabitants. We asked the man for directions to the port, in hope of buying tickets for the boat. On the way we tried to ask again, but the people we talked to did not even understand the words "puerto" and "barco" in Spanish. Guarani is the preferred language among these people. When we did find the port, we were happy to see that there was a big boat down by the river bank. The name of the boat was "Aquidaban". There were some people fishing from the boat, so we boarded to ask where to buy the ticket. They pointed at a building on the corner of the street, far from the dock house. The place was not open, so we talked to the neighbour, who could inform us that there would be people there around three o' clock.

To kill some time we went back the 20 blocks to the city center. Luckily there was a man on a horse carriage who would let us ride with him. At 7 pm we returned to buy our tickets. It cost 100 000 per person, about five Euros per day. That is not too bad, considering the beautiful scenery we would pass, and the interesting situations we could end up in. We had been there at 3 pm as well, but the office was closed and we were asked to come back at seven. This is standard procedure in Latin America. The only thing that is sure is that nothing will ever be on time, and must God forbid that these religious people ever do anything before deadline, or show up early for a planned meeting.

Before buying some chicken and bread on the way back to our "hospitaje", which by the way was easy to find because of a large antenna with the letters NASA on it. It was attached to a building across the square. We stopped by an internet cafe. This would be our last connection point with the world around us in at least five days. I sent a few messages and made a couple of skype calls. The boat was scheduled to leave at 11, but to be sure that we would find hammocks that were unoccupied, we had to be on the boat at 7. We went to bed early to make sure we could get up at 6, and fight for the hammocks.